It's not the typeface that's the problem, really. It's the inappropriate use of the typeface. Comic Sans is frequently used in an inappropriate way because it was one of the small group of fonts that came with every copy of the Windows operating system. People who aren't graphics professionals or who don't have a particularly developed aesthetic choose Comic Sans so often simply because it looks more like handwriting than other typefaces, unaware that the "jauntiness" of the face is inappropriate in many typographical situations. If these non-professional and/or casual sign makers had a broader range of typefaces to choose from, Comic Sans would be just another handwriting font. Windows ships with many more fonts than it used to, so I suspect the ubiquity of Comic Sans will fade.

The real problem comes from a typeface that is much more ubiquitous and much more terrible than Comic Sans: Arial, the cheap-looking, boring rip-off of Helvetica (which I don't like that much either).

It's funny because when I read this article the other day in the WSJ, I thought, "Man, Althouse should blog about this."And I like Arial. It's great when you are doing something that involves pure information because it helps you focus on only the information.

Something written in binary, something written in a secret code, logarithm lists. I can think of many examples.

If I were to hate a font it might be Courier. Do I really need something to look like it was written by a typewriter when people forget such things ever existed? But I can't hate it, because it's used for ASCII art.

Perhaps I'm in the minority, I certainly am among commenters here, but I really don't care. When Perez Hilton is a Miss America judge I'm inclined to feel there are a lot of more important crappy insignificant things we could talk about.

On CAD nothing reduces as well as Arial but the problem is at .10 inch (the optimum size for text on a dwg) arial overwhelms the drawing. But if you make it smaller than .10 at full scale then it's unreadable at half scale. So Arial is no good for CAD.

In the same way, many people who do programming often prefer some variant of Courier, ugly as it may be. There is something about that typewritery face that makes it hard to mistake numbers, and that makes it possible to stare at otherwise meaningless letters and figures for hours on end without fatigue.Despite my enthusiasm for it, it's not so much Courier as any fixed-width font. Typesetting values seek to minimize and order blank space in a way that's functional for prose, but contrary to reading code.

Well, I've done some experiments with this, because I've been fascinated by the prospect of bringing coding to a place where it modeled English.

Yes, I know about COBOL. And similar works. But in most coding style guides, there's a concept of making variable names significant.

But I've found that you can get into trouble that way, because it's easy for the reader to assume a meaning based on his English understanding. And once a programmer understands what the actual code does, using variable names like Xyzzy, Floobie and Hatano can actually be clearer than "Printer" "PrintSpool" and "PrePrinter"--precisely because there's no chance that they're misleading.

And I think this is because, once you understand code, you tokenize it much like a compiler would.

Contrast with reading, where you're looking for the ambiguities, the layers, the possible deception. That's part of the art.

Y'know, it's all well and good to have your variable names mean something, but all the legacy code I work with, that was written in the 70s, has variable names like I, J, IA, JA, . . . to save space back when memory was tremendously expensive. Or I get code written by people in Brazil and all the variable names are in Portuguese.

If you can understand the logic of the code, the names are irrelevant.

I hate Times New Roman almost as much as Comic Sans. The most drab, over-used typeface ever. In almost every circumstance where you want a serif font, Georgia looks way, way better, both on screen and in print.

Times New Roman, however, makes me physically uncomfortable. Seriously, it distresses me. Have you ever turned a page and found yourself staring at an enlarged picture of a particularly nasty bug and cringed. Times New Roman does that to me. First thing I do on any new computer is change the default font to Arial, or sometimes, one of the Gothics.

Hector, thanks for sharing that video. So true to the way I react to fonts.

Back in the 90's at Adobe, around the time when Microsoft's TrueType was overwhelming Adobe's Type1, and Acrobat / PDF was beginning to become a powerhouse, someone in the font rendering team wrote a white paper on portable documents for the future. The paper analyzed PDF, scalable fonts, stroke-based Kanji fonts, print resolution, and on and on. The conclusion? If you want your document to be readable by everyone in 10 years, write it in:

If you can understand the logic of the code, the names are irrelevant.

My point exactly, MadMan. And the illusion of thinking you understand it because it resembles English (because, semantically, your English interpretation might lead you astray) is dangerous.

I think it helps the casual reader--someone looking for a quick basic understanding on his way to somewhere else. If you've ever looked over code with those short variable names, they require you to get into them to get them at all.

But I think the whole "meaningful variable names" thing is over-rated.